The European Commission has given tech firms three months to set up systems that will allow them to take down terrorist content within an hour.
The Commission's missive is a recommendation and builds on a communication made last September – although it is technically a legal text in EU-ese, it isn't legally binding for the …

Analysis
The UK government launched its swish new tool to fight online extremist content to much fanfare this week – leading news bulletins and generating reams of coverage. But it also faced a whole host of criticism and concern.
Underneath the claims made by Home Secretary Amber Rudd yesterday, there are many questions yet to be …

Secure end-to-end encrypted comms is a desirable technology that governments should stop trying to break, especially as there's other information to slurp up on crims, UK politicians were told this week.
Blighty's former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson, told the House of Commons Home Affairs …

Tech firms are indirectly costing the UK government millions in "human surveillance" of extremist content and should have a windfall tax levied against them to make up for it, according to security minister Ben Wallace.
Wallace said that inaction from internet giants means the cost of tackling terror content is "heaped on law …

A British teenager who tried to order a car bomb on the dark web and get it delivered to his address has been found guilty this week.
Gurtej Randhawa
Failure ... Gurtej Randhawa (Source: NCA)
Gurtej Randhawa, 19, of Wightwick, in the West Midlands of England, was cuffed by cops in May after purchasing what he thought was …

A lawsuit accusing YouTube of playing a key role in the November 2015 Paris terror attacks has been all but thrown out of court.
Northern California District Judge Donna Ryu ruled [PDF] this week that the Mountain View ads broker could not be held liable for killings apparently inspired by terror bastards' propaganda videos on …

UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd has once again demonstrated she does not know how encryption works, this time by explicitly admitting it to delegates at a Tory party fringe conference where she also hit out at "patronising" techies that "sneered" at politicians.
Speaking at a Spectator event, Rudd said: "It's so easy to be …

Muhammad Rabbani, international director of human-rights non-profit CAGE, was today convicted under UK anti-terror law for refusing to unlock his iPhone and laptop for police when entering the country.
Rabbani, 36, was found guilty at Westminster magistrates’ court of willful obstruction under Schedule 7 paragraph 18(1)(c) of …

DerbyCon
An analysis of the hacking groups allying themselves to Daesh/ISIS has shown that about 18 months ago the religious fanatics stopped trying to develop their own secure communications and hacking tools and instead turned to the criminal underground to find software that actually works.
Kyle Wilhoit, a senior security researcher …

The UK's Prime Minister has once again raised the tech stakes in the fight against online terror, with her latest, er, bright idea being for internet giants to stop extremist content before it's even online.
At a meeting with companies including Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Google today, Theresa May urged them to "develop …

Two Middle Eastern airlines have lifted the ban on in-cabin laptops on flights to the US.
The ban, imposed in March over fears that terrorists could smuggle bombs disguised as laptops on aeroplanes, has been scrapped with immediate effect on Emirates and Turkish Airlines flights.
Passengers were asked to leave devices larger …

Russia's communications regulator is threatening to lower the boom on popular encrypted messaging application Telegram.
It might look like yet another government attack on user-accessible encryption, but in this letter, the head of regulator Roskomnadzor Alexander Zharov says the messaging app is violating Russian legislation …

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube have created a super-team to tackle terrorism.
The fearless foursome currently face a tricky foe: public and government sentiment that their social licence could be revoked if they don't do something about their platforms being used to spread hate speech that radicalises users and …

The Australian State of Queensland wants the power to force citizens to unlock their devices during a declared terrorist emergency.
The state government introduced legislation under the title “Counter-Terrorism and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2016” earlier this month.
The bill's explanatory note (PDF) complains that …

Google's revealed its plans to remove terror-related content from YouTube and decided the investment community should hear about it before the rest of us.
The plan emerged in a post first published in the Financial Times and later popped online, the company's revealed a four-point plan.
As was the case in Facebook's anti- …

Facebook is once again trying to scrub clean its public image after it was criticized for allowing extremism to spread on its social media platform.
“Our stance is simple: There’s no place on Facebook for terrorism. We remove terrorists and posts that support terrorism whenever we become aware of them,” the company declared in …

Australia's opposition leader Bill Shorten has suggested that governmental action to deny use of encryption to terrorists should extend to Bitcoin.
In a speech to the House of Representatives yesterday, Shorten fell into lock-step with Australia's plan to compel technology companies to build not-backdoors into their products …

Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron are planning to issue multi-million pound fines to technology companies that don’t act fast enough to remove material that governments and police forces disapprove of.
The UK Prime Minister and her French counterpart are meeting in Paris today and, among other Brexit and security-related topics …